Vancouver (Canada)

Going for a holiday almost half-way around the earth need'nt cost the same. In Feburary of 2004 my wife and I flew Air Canada to British Columbia on the west coast of Canada for a packed ten-day holiday with a view towards seeing if we liked the area well enough to consider emigrating there. Believe it or not, it was our first trip to Canada. This sounds quite a statement for such a potentially momentous decision, but all the research I have done before hand suggested that BC had all the things we were looking for. Reasonable house prices, less pollution, less stress, beautiful setting and a people that suprisingly enough are a lot closer in attitude to us Brits than the inhabitants of the US are. (Never call a Canadian "American" as it is generally taken as an insult!!)

We made the decision to visit Canada at the start of Spring. Why? Because you can find some real bargains in terms of the cost of flights and hotel accommodation, saving literally hundreds of pounds. You're hardly going to be going to Canada in order to get a tan anyway! The flight from Heathrow was as pleasant as a long, sustained flight in economy could be. From London to Vancouver is an approximate nine hours, little more than the equivalent into Toronto or New York. We did'nt take the kids with us on this occasion, but if you are planning on doing so, I would recommend investing in a large number of sketch books, comics and even an MP3 or portable DVD player. It would be the best money you have ever spent! Regardless, moving about the cabin and stretching your legs is advisable. The service aboard was courteous and professional, though the plane was'nt new enough to have personal movie screens for example. The food we had was reasonable for airline chow and when you book your flight, you can choose between a bewildering variety of meals.

Unfortunately, there was'nt a direct flight into Vancouver available when we booked, so we had a short stop in Calgary where for some reason officials were walking about grinning happily under unfeasably large cowboy hats. The transfer was supposed to be half an hour, but there was no way in hell we could get our luggage in that sort of timeframe. As a result, we spent almost four hours in the airport waiting for a connecting flight into Vancouver. I would very much recommend making sure that you get a direct flight if you are planning to go as we were both tired and irritable by this point.

Once over the rockies, we landed in the evening at local time, passing through a friendly border control and reclaimed our luggage before taking a cab into downtown Vancouver. The streets are very Americ…erm…North American, wide and with potholes. Crossing the Burrard bridge, the potholes vanished as if by magic while our first view of downtown Vancouver, lights a'blazin' was magnificent. After tipping the driver probably far too much, we walked into the lobby of where we would begin our hols for the first few days relying on public transport before heading back up to the airport to pick up a rental car. Vancouver as we were to discover has a well-planned city core that is startlingly clean. The hotel we were based at was the Ramada Inn and Suites Downtown Vancouver, the idea being we could walk all the way down to the port in about 30 minutes or so. The hotel looked nice on the internet with an art deco style. Unfortunately it was run down with dirty sheets that had cigarette burns in them and seemed a popular place for kids to go and par-tay. It had an attached bar come restaurant that offered a cheap way to fill up in the mornings and the staff kindly loaned me a broken umbrella that when opened did its best to poke both my eyes out. The immediate area was more than a little seedy and as you can tell, we have no plans to stay there again. On top of all of this, it rained hard and regularly. Overall, not the best start - but it was going to get a lot better.

The inclement weather meant that we had to abandon several trips in the city, including to the Suz-Tze chinese gardens in Chinatown when the sky began to empty. Rest assured, there are many things you can do in Vancouver when it's raining and the wife discovered that shopping was one of them! On the bright side, apart from walking past a store that proudly proclaimed itself "London Drugs", we did get to go to The Cat's Meow as planned, a trendy restauraunt on Granville Island underneath the bridge near our hotel, another reason for choosing the location. The "Island" has a marina and many activities for all the family during the day, at night offering plenty of places to eat. The Cat's Meow lived up to its reputation for good quality surf 'n turf style food with a great friendly atmosphere and a nice view. For Canadians, it is expensive - but no more than most Brits are used to paying at even a halfway edible Indian or Chinese restaurant back in blighty. We took a cab back to the hotel. Public transport in Vancouver is very good, including the "Skytrain" as well as buses, but cabs are not expensive and often a more handy option. You do have to be quick on your feet to get one sometimes, though.

Our best excursion in Vancouver was our trip to the top of Grouse mountain in North Vancouver. To get there, you take a bus or walk to the port near Canada Place, a large building in the commercial district jutting out into the bay that resembles a cruise liner (those crazy Canucks, eh?). From there you take a ferry across to the North shore. They run them many and often as quite apart from the tourists, it is one of the main thoroughfares for commuting Canadians. The North Shore is where you get your first real experience of the Canada most people think of, green forested rolling hills with mountains in the background. The bus took us from the strip malls of the shoreline up into said hills to the bottom of grouse mountain. This is one of Vancouver's most well known attractions. In the winter and spring it is a haven for Skiers, snowboarders and ice skaters and as we were about to discover to our cost, very, very cold. In the summer, it offers long walks, helicopter rides and lumberjack shows and there is quite a nice IMAX show and ubiquitous pricy giftshops.

Nornally it costs about £12 PP to get entry up to grouse, but if you have dinner reservations for "The Observatory" on the top of the mountain as we did, then it's free. The swiss-built cable car took us from a rainy mountain base to a snowswept wonderland in the space of two minutes and a beauty that was stunning as the mountains rolled away to either side. If you've never been on a cable car before, the ride can be most alarming. There were a pair of kids from the city in the car with us bearing snowboards, who lent my wife and I their spare pairs of gloves, a very kind and a very Canadian thing to do for the most part. Under grey skies and increasing snowfall, we went on a sleigh ride through the snow, cuddling, shivering and accidentally taking a minute of footage of the sleigh skis into the bargain. The sleigh left us deep in artic country where we trudged through foot-deep drifts of snow in order to see Grinder and Coola - two orphaned Grizzly cubs being raised (behind mildly electrified mesh) there. Even just as cubs, each one would have weighed as much as I do, but Coola was happy enough, chasing his toys around the enclosure and oblivious to us. Rescued from hypothermia, we took the sleigh back to the main building and all but melted in front of a roaring log fire while a cabal?, a gaggle? of Japanese tourists laughed and took pictures of anything and everything.

With the time for our dinner fast approaching, we made our way into The Observatory, a semi-circular room with wide, strengthened windows that looks all the way down across the bay towards Vancouver. There we had what was undoubtedly the best meal of our lives courtesy of renowned Chef Sylvain Cuerrier. It beat anything I've had in Knightsbridge or Kensington for less money (about £22 PP and that's with a nice bottle of wine) and I've yet to have its equal. Examples of the food they offer are Grilled Squid Stuffed with Lobster and Mergez Sausage, Broiled Californian Striped Bass or seared Scallops with a chorizo risotto and basil froth. If you ever, EVER go to Vancouver, this is a must. We ate an unforgettable meal in the warmth as a blizzard raged outside the windows, gusts obscuring the evergreens. We came back happy.

We said our goodbyes to Vancouver in the morning as we took another cab ride to the airport and came away with a free upgrade from Avis to a Chrysler PT Cruiser which is a "small" car over there. (You will find a lot of sedans the size of Mercedes E classes and many 4x4's and pickup trucks) We headed south towards the county of Surrey (they also have New Westminister and Richmond) in order to look for potential houses. We stayed in a Best Western that had decided for some bizzare reason to setup shop close to an known area of prostitutes. My wife by this time was wondering whether the next hotel I had booked us into was going to be part abbatoir or perhaps have an indian graveyard onsuite. The hotel at least was very clean and well run. In the morning, our estate agent (or Realtor) picked us up. Her name was Penny Bastien and she worked for Royal LePage (maybe still does). I remember her name because she is a credit to her profession. She was not pushy and must have known that the odds of us buying anything would have been miniscule, yet she showed us around the area with a mixture of openness and pride that I found refreshing. I've never had occasion to praise an estate agent, most of whom are clearly in league with the devil, but Penny was marvellous. For the record, you could get a detached 4-5 bed house on a big lot (garden) for around £175,000.

After staying in Surrey, we had booked ferry passage to Vancouver departing from the marvellously named Tsawassen. Before we left, we headed south near the border with Seattle to spend the day at Crescent beach and White Rock. Crescent beach was a beautiful upscale community with miles of parkland and stretches of pebbled beach overlooked by well kept wooden houses. It seemed to be a nice, understated if expensive place to live. White Rock by comparison was distinctly touristy where we had an expensive, disapointing meal in one of the many large restaurants facing the sea inlet and walked past many of the little shops selling all kinds of horrid tourist tat. Occasionally a BMW bought by daddy for the spoilt teenager sitting inside would cruise by with the music set too high in an attempt to persuade people that he/was was cool and hip, and not a complete twat. Like I say, Crescent beach was very nice.

We set off early to Tsawassen, past little towns with large, inexpensive houses and out across a miles long spur to the ferry port. It was massive, as it needed to be to house several of the gigantic ferries at once. We were to go on one of the smaller vessels, which only weighed about 9,000 tons even before the 294 cars were driven on and parked. BC's largest ferries handle up to 494 cars just to keep things in perspective. The trip from Tsawassen on the mainland to Duke point just outside Nanaimo on Vancouver Island takes about 2 hours and 40 nautical miles. When sailing, you are reminded by the rich blue of the ocean that this is the pacific, and if you are lucky you will see whales as you thread your way past picturesque minor islands. There are plenty of places to eat or shop or pickup tourist info on your destination while onboard, though the surroundings are workmanlike at best, this is just a ferry after all.

Coming into the heavily wooded and downright massive Vancouver Island, we exited the terminal and drove into Nanaimo, one of the larger towns on the Island and one that could perhaps get away with calling itself a city (as it does) without too much sniggering on my part (It has a population of 80,000). It is on the whole a nice, neat town with a university but the outlying parts nearest the ferry terminal are rather untidy and look as though they are home to people that might hint that you have a "purdy mouth." Our hotel had a small car park of its own and was facing the wonderful harbour, as was our double room within it. What's more, there was'nt an abbatoir or indian burial ground in sight. It was the Best Western Dorchester and comes highly recommended as much for the view over the water where the seaplanes take off in the morning for the mainland as the excellent food served in the onsite restaurant called "Casablanca". They did'nt play "that" song, thank God. During our entire time on Vancouver Island it rained a grand total of once, for five minutes while we drove through the mountains.

Downtown Nanaimo is very nice, though the owner of Hill's Native arts on Bastion street had apalling manners for a Canadian. The library is a good inexpensive place to rent a high speed internet connection to communicate with those back home and reassure them that you've yet to be mauled by an angry bear and there are many small, family-run places that offer high quality food for reasonable prices. The following day was spent checking out house prices with a minature chinese immigrant in a huge 4x4 whose enthusiasm rapidly waned when it became clear we were not intending to hand him a deposit on the day. My lack of faith in estate agents was quickly renewed and we ended our investigations early. After a good meal and a sustained nap, we set off into the interior.

Vancouver Island is massive. Almost 300 miles by 50 with almost half the population living solely in the capital of Victoria itself. As a result, there are large tracts of land that are virtually inhabited with national parks, mountains and glaciers. Because land is so freely available, even the majority of commercial buildings are single story ones which looks rather weird to European eyes. We drove using cheap, cheap petrol up through miles and miles of pretty wilderness punctuated with the occasional rig hauling timber. We drove past lakes so vast that we had to stop and take pictures and onto cathedral grove, the world's oldest living forest. The trees here are immense, many covered to heights of thirty feet or more in lichen. The air is pure and freezing while the wind moans through the treetops. It is so still at ground level, and has such an ancient primordial feeling to it that we had to leave after twenty minutes and head back to the car. We stopped on our way back to check out little Qualicum falls where thousands tons of melt water from the mountains thunder through a rocky gorge with a ferocity you can't capture on camera. It was a fantastic and very cheap day out. Given time, we would have liked to have travelled further into Tofino which is supposed to be beautiful. Next time. We stopped at Qualicum beach to eat seafood at an restaurant happy to see the custom before returning to the hotel.

The following day we headed south, down the coastal road towards Victoria. It was a long drive of several hours, past many towns still waiting for their heyday to arrive. We climbed steep mountain roads before heading down into the capital. By Vancouver Island standards, Victoria is a metropolis. It is also home to many culinary colleges which makes it difficult to find any restaurant that serves bad food. Make no mistake, Victoria knows very well where the majority of its income flows from, and as a result, tourist shops and chinz are everywhere to best cater for what it in the majority are day-trippers from their cousins in the south. The city has many fantastic buildings, such as the magnificently festooned Empress Hotel facing the Inner Harbour, the parliament buildings or the Royal British Columbian Museum among many, many others. There is a tour of the city that begins outside the Empress that is well worth taking. The grand city tour (on a London double decker, yawn) from greylinewest continues up through the city's own chinatown past the open spaces of Beacon Hill Park and into the affluent surroundings of Uplands and Oak bay with a short stop included before returning back down to the inner harbour. It's reasonable value for money and worth doing unless you fancy driving around Victoria's busy streets yourself.

Again, there are many places to visit in Victoria that we did'nt have time for. We did manage however to visit the Crystal Gardens, a victorian style building with tropical settings, parrots, monkeys and bats. It was a really well done facility that has since closed down, been remodelled and has reopened as the BC "Experience" - some sort of technological showcase with mini galleries - a museum with no real life to speak of in other words. Pity. We ate at Hunter's steakhouse on Yate's street, a fantastic restaurant that took a while to walk to but was well worth it. Next time we are in Victoria, we will definitely eat there again. We returned to the harbour to pick up the car and pointed it northwards.

With our holiday rapidly coming to its conclusion, we checked out and drove back to (if memory serves) a second smaller ferry terminal in Departure bay. This time, we sailed to a point on the mainland much further north, in West Vancouver which is not to be confused with Vancouver West (?). A large part of the journey was spent staring open-mouthed at the most picturesque series of mountains I had ever seen. These were'nt the Rockies as I first thought, but were mere foothills in comparison - and what foothills they were….

We drove back towards Vancover, entering it via the Lion's gate bridge and through Stanley Park. Worried about arriving at the airport in time, I did'nt stop as planned in the Park which is supposed to be magnificent. My telling off abated many miles later when we entered the airport and handed the car back. In the airport, you can use the receipts of what you have bought in order to fill out a form and claim the Canadian tax back. We never saw dime one unfortunately. Next time, we will use the service that offers instant cash instead, but at a charge. Our flight back was thankfully direct, and apart from the obese, sweaty woman bending the seat out of shape that sat in front of us, it was an uneventful flight back.

Several years later, we are still in the UK. Why? At the time we went there was something of a recession in British Columbia exacerbated by an almost frenetic panic about SARS (Many Canadian immigrants are Chinese). As a result, qualified Canadian professionals were washing dishes to get by. Canada seems to have entered a steady period of late and who knows? With the right job and dragging alone the two elder of our three boys in handcuffs, we may still end up living there, but regardless of whether we do or not, we will certainly return to BC if only on holiday. This remains one of the best vacations we have ever had and cost us a grand total of about £1350 which considering what we did and where we went was good value indeed.